Windows 7 Benchmarking With The Phoronix Test Suite?

One of the most common questions that gets brought up with regard to the Phoronix Test Suite is whether support for Microsoft Windows will ultimately come to our open-source benchmarking platform. After all, even on Windows there really is no public software readily available (as far as we know) that is quite like what we have designed with an extensible test profile architecture/framework, support for uploading of any tests to a central repository (Phoronix Global), full automation of the testing process, remote test management (Phoromatic), etc. In future releases there will be several more unique capabilities that further distinguish the Phoronix Test Suite. The short answer is that Windows support for the Phoronix Test Suite could come.

With the Phoronix Test Suite being mostly self-contained and just having a single real dependency on PHP (which is, of course, available for Windows) it wouldn't be too difficult having mainline Windows support for this GPLv3 benchmarking software. The biggest area would be adding Windows support to Phodevi, the Phoronix Device Interface, which provides the abstracted system hardware/software library for reading the installed components, etc. Some changes would also be needed within pts-core for Windows support, but it really wouldn't be too much with nearly all of pts-core being OS-independent and completely portable. Some changes would be needed for the test profiles, but Windows support could be incorporated without much of an issue. Of course, not all of the current 120+ test profiles would work on Windows, but a good number of them would, especially if incorporating Cygwin support. In fact, it's possible that Windows support could come to Phoronix Test Suite 3.0. Of course, besides Linux, the Phoronix Test Suite is already fully supported on Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD operating systems too.

Windows support for the Phoronix Test Suite, however, is not an active priority. Sure, we could easily run some benchmarks now for a real comparison of Windows vs. Linux vs. *BSDs vs. OpenSolaris vs. Mac OS X, but beyond having some benchmarking fun and getting a few articles out of the deal, there is no financial interest right now in providing the said support. Of course, if any software/hardware vendors, other companies, or organizations want to step up to the plate, we would be happy to introduce such capabilities. We don't even have any Windows systems at this time. Providing this support for Microsoft Windows 7 though would allow many organizations to now have a single test system that spans all of their supported platforms.